ABSTRACT
David Gilmore, an anthropologist who has written on Mediterranean culture, recently published one of the few comparative studies of masculinity. He suggests that in many cultures manhood involves three major demands – to procreate, to protect and to provision. His argument is about systemic necessities, and how these shape the challenges which mould both individual males and men in groups. Gilmore concludes that: ‘Manhood is the social barrier that societies must erect against entropy, human enemies, the process of nature, time and all the human weaknesses that endanger group life’ (1990: 226). In this chapter, gender ideas are approached rather closer to the ground, in specific discourses, contexts and institutional domains, and without any assumptions of functional necessities. I am not happy with statements about ‘masculinity’ in Greek culture as substantive generalizations, even though it is easy to concede that some clustering of related concepts exists when terms like andras (a man, a husband), pateras (a father) and pallikari (an upstanding unmarried youth) are employed throughout Greece. Greece as a state is highly centralized, with the Ministry of Education imposing
one kind of uniformity and the mass media contributing skeins of contrasting and contradictory uniformities. ‘Greek culture’ is, therefore, an idea of some specific and limited value. Greece is characterized by distinctive regions, contrasting production regimes and differing rates of social change; these features are cross-cut by cities, classes, the church and the army, each a producer of contrasting discourses and assertions about gender. I wish to explore a handful of linked themes which suggest a sense of the varied
contexts in which masculinities can be understood. These include marriage, procreation and householding as hegemonic gender values; the ways that different types of post-marital residence seem to relate to different emphases in maleness and femaleness; sexuality, and expressions of personhood which are not part of the conjugal householding package; celibacy as a domain for difference; male
friendship and its contextual variations; and last, local ideas of an independent, autonomous masculinity, and contrasting ideas of a domesticated maleness. My own field data were collected from 1968 onwards. I was guided by Dur-
kheimian assumptions and had undoubtedly assumed that maleness and femaleness would be the subjects of widespread cultural consensus and standardization. While this framework may have been valid for some preliterate cultures, I now feel that it cannot accommodate the organization of gender concepts in complex states in which region, class and institutional differences are important. New fieldwork should explore the full range of gender identities in a dis-
crete research area. However, here, I am only able to proceed by juxtaposing fragments of material from various Greek ethnographies. I do not recommend this approach – I simply offer a suggestive bricolage faute de mieux. This volume proposes a theoretical emphasis in which male identities are asserted in specific acts or contexts. The editors argue that masculinity is not a stable essence, present throughout a lifetime or a stage of life, but a series of negotiated identities, acts of will, assertions, performances, fragments of a person who at other times and in other contexts may have other gender attributes. I am largely sympathetic with these emphases, but suggest at the end of this chapter that they leave us with a fresh set of difficulties.
